Within the scope of a curriculum that critically diagnoses the Anthropocene as the capacity to break the Earth system, we inevitably also find among the wreckage prescriptions of remedy or repair. But repair follows complex prognoses—since the problems that need “fixing” are far from singular correctives. This pathway attempts to navigate the twists and turns of the multitudes and meanings of repair. 

Restoration ecology promises repair of the catastrophic fragmentation of the web of life that plantation and capitalist logics have wrought over earthly landscapes. Artist and educator Ellie Irons unfolds the complexities of restoration conceived by biological conservation science through public fieldwork encounters with the kudzu plant in Louisiana, in the American South.8.3.1 Following “the vine that ate the South,” Irons traces kudzu’s categorical downgrading from a plant once thought useful for recuperating exhausted soils to an invasive species. Her research and practice show how its new scientific identity as biological alien is underscored by allusions to purity and white-nationalist eco-fascism that can lurk in the shadows of some restorative ethics. In this account of how a “miracle solution became a pest,” Irons tells a prescient tale of repair that captures the risks of hubristic solutionism forged by fear of scarcity and imaginaries of control. How can ideas of repair as “going back” to something—or toward a determined outcome—evade such errors that necessitate ever new rounds of “repair”? Similarly, conceiving of repair as return can obscure the nonlinearity and possibility that arise through emergent properties of change. The growing richness of ecological habitats of the demilitarized zones of Cherwon in South Korea8.3.2 (close to the border of North Korea), for example, highlights the messy possibilities of the Anthropocene to which some non-anthropos have started to adapt. What original state would “repair” return this site to? As a happy accident of the new conditions generated by rice farming, the post-conflict region provides preferential conditions for cranes searching out rest and recuperation on their migration routes—a situation that highlights how “repair” will need to account for ecological interdependencies that may not be deemed “original” or “pure.” This demonstrates the uncertain enmeshments of human and nonhuman needs that exceed plannable restoration, even while sensitive and place-specific kinds of restoration are essential to stem the tide of ongoing biological diversity loss.

As a flagship paradigm of planetary repair, “rewilding” practices proliferate among experimental ecologists and private landowners with enough space and resources to support megafauna introductions that attempt to recreate Pleistocene conditions. Like repair, aiming to “return” a place to being “wild” evokes a reference baseline—implying efforts to return to a state in the past. But the meaning of each part—“re” and “wild”—is more contested and multiple than this increasingly fashionable term conveys. Its polyvalence can make it adaptable to pernicious political agendas. For example, sometimes evocative of Romantic ideals of pristine nature, talk of rewilding can be deployed to justify the removal of components deemed not “natural” enough. Yet, inevitably, the spatial politics of land use for (re)wildling troubles the optimism of Edenic visions of planetary redemption—as traditional stewards who are often evicted from landscapes for these purposes know only too well. In response to a similar pressure, curators Gilly Karjevsky and Rosario Talevi write of their work enacting site-symbiotic relations at the Floating University: a site built over a rainwater collection basin formerly serving Berlin’s Tempelhof airport. The urban ecology to be imminently “rewilded” by the landowners threatens the continued presence of the Floating University and inspired the centering of the complex politics of rewilding during the 2021 Climate Care festival.8.3.3 Rewilding in this case is envisaged as providing a way beyond the maintenance of costly gray infrastructure that sustains rainwater canalization toward a “nature-based solution” that will draw on the free work of ecosystem services: a form of metabolic repair that uses life to manage life. 

In contrast, visions of rewilding that integrate rather than exclude human presence suggest we might become different kinds of ecosystem engineers, regenerating the abundant capacities for diverse forms of life through our own metabolizing compulsions—like earthworms, composting for and with human and other species’ media. But steering ourselves, our metabolic activities, and our ingenuities in such directions means shifting vast technospheric infrastructures onto new paths too, not because they malfunction but rather because they overfunction in singular remits of productivity, with concentrated energetic transformations that rupture webs of well-regulated cycles.8.3.4 Notwithstanding the epic infrastructural backstage of repair required for maintaining decaying machineries, the energetic flows that feed these metabolic appetites are sustained through an acceleration of what historian of science Benjamin Steininger describes as the “bonding and carrying forward of nonhuman chemical metabolic chains.”8.3.5 Steiniger writes of the profound asymmetry between geohistorical accumulation of deep-time fossil carbon and its persistent, pervasive, and rapid release through combustion. Urbanist design researcher Nikos Katsikis traces another warped scale of the Anthropocene—that between planetary urbanism and its dislocated hinterlands—which he suggests now represents the “the totality of a Hinterglobe.”8.3.6 Reading both pieces in reverse would indicate that metabolic repair (of the technosphere, of the atmosphere, or of our own often metabolically pathological bodies) could begin to occur only if consumptive societies align their energy exchange to speeds and scales closer to home, avoiding deep time and long distance. In this respect, food thinker and writer Carolyn Steel refers to creative and collaborative efforts underway in the forging of positive and nourishing (in contrast to extractive and poisoning) “Sitopias”— that is, “places shaped by food”—which include dismantling the concentrated, industrial systems of food production that supply cheap sugars, proteins, fats, and calories to places far away.8.3.7 Decentralizing and dispersing the spatial configurations and ownerships of technology away from corporate and industrial control confers possibilities for greater collective autonomy. It also reflects the ethics of low-tech conviviality evoked by the Krzak Inventory of “tools-objects-friends.”8.3.8 Tool-kin for the Spółdzielnia Krzak Warsaw-based collective perform as considered and responsive mediators for the materiality of collective space according to the metabolic scale of hand and body, with affect, care, and responsibility. 

The materiality of place is shaped by how it is known and who controls this knowledge. In this sense, models for knowing and tools of imagination must be as entrained toward agendas of repair as physical technology and infrastructure. Artists and educators Sarah Lewison and Andrew Yang describe the narratives in the St. Louis region that make the logic of extraction impervious to criticism on account of the jobs it provides.8.3.9 Such a locking-in stifles imaginative possibilities of other economic arrangements and other relations of value built on care. Examples of alternatives do, however, exist, as Lewison and Yang make visible in their contribution. Similarly, interdisciplinary storyteller Monique Verdin (in conversation with architect Derek Hoeferlin) describes the enclosure of imagination8.3.10 that conditions Louisianans to feel as though they either have oil and gas or they have nothing, thereby foreclosing the possibility of other experimental, life-supporting, and non-mineralogical economies. What is the repair work that can provide healing and make visible these imaginaries as merely pathological representations of scarcity? Practicing alternate visualizations is inherent to repairing impoverished or enclosed imaginations. During the Anthropocene River Campus, participants of the “Un/bounded Engineering and Evolutionary Stability” seminar8.3.11 engaged in a collective practice of drawing New Orleans’ delta infrastructures to co-create imaginable futures as systems less defined by fixity and stability. In a parallel technique, collaborative architectural practice Design Earth create architectural speculations that not only make visible the geographies of waste systems (so as to confront their often disavowed existence) but also engage “alternative political and aesthetic propositions.”8.3.12 Models are inscriptive, writes researcher Matthijs Kouw, and modeling practices shape the understanding of target systems.8.3.13 In the target systems of repair—modalities that strive toward definitive climate “outcomes,” biodiversity baselines, and tidy water infrastructures—both the processes and practices that make the models and the degrees of reflexivity that model users can deploy are critical. For example, climate scientists who once vigorously promoted the climate-repair model of net zero now regret the “burn now, pay later” perversities set in motion by its accounting logic. 

Symbolic registers of loss and gain are necessarily incomplete. Such incompleteness is visible in the seemingly magical invocations of the Christian tradition used to “rectify” very much nonsymbolic violences through expressions of repentance. Ideas of “repair” overlap with “reparations”—as making something right or “settling the score” for a spectrum of ongoing colonial and racial injustices. Strangely, these concepts parallel the symbolic and abstract accounting techniques of climate net zero. In both scenarios, we encounter difficult questions of incommensurability with regard to the exchange of harm for good. But who adjudicates the exchange? Which actors or models attribute the values of each? Recognizing the impossibility of measuring loss,8.3.14 artist Sarah Lewison asks what it would take to facilitate the reparation of injustice. Reparations, she writes, must at the very least involve labor, commitment, and energy to consider and witness the trauma of others. Scholar and practitioner Huiying Ng suggests that hope itself must be collectively metabolized in this way.8.3.15 She writes of the social metabolisms of emotional hurt, suffering, and intergenerational inheritance as inseparable from the metabolic rifts of material society. If this reality were widely acknowledged, what would climate or ecological repair look like? How might it be informed by grief? For grieving is a form of repair, but not one of “going back,” since the obligatory passage toward healing requires acceptance of what has been lost. It compels witnessing. Grieving is a process of preparing to be again in relation. It is a form of becoming ready to meet the world with renewed agency. Perhaps grief is the best model we have for repair. Grief can only ever be about the process, never the outcome—which will remain unknown and recalcitrant. Like grief, the effort toward socio-ecological repair is a process of making ourselves, our systems, and the ways we practice in and with the world ready for an uncertain future: a process of confronting what we must let go of, as well as welcome in, to achieve such readiness.